Lunacy Floats

What's 750 feet long, weighs more than
50,000 tons, floats on blue Caribbean water and has an IQ upwards
of 190,000 that will only get higher by hanging out with itself for
a week?

Try the Linux Lunacy 2001 cruise, which sails October 21-27.
Copresented by GeekCruises.com and Linux Journal, Linux Lunacy will cruise between ports in the
Bahamas, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico in a Holland America
ship featuring ten passenger decks and educational sessions on
programming, languages, tools and issues ranging across free and
open-source development cultures, privacy, hacker politics, ham
radio and troubleshooting IT projects—among many other
things.

Leading these sessions is an all-star cast of Linux
Luminaries (and leading lunatics):

Richard Stallman—the world's leading authority on
Free Software, a distinction he earned as founder of the GNU
Project and author of its leading works, including GNU C compiler,
Emacs, GDB and other tools that went into building what we call
GNU/Linux, along with much of the common computing infrastructure
we all enjoy today. His work has been recognized by Grace Hopper
and MacArthur Foundation awards, among many other honors. Richard
will teach classes on Emacs Lisp Programming and Emacs
editing.

Eric S. Raymond—self-described hacker and
anthropologist who studied the Hacker tribe for a decade and a half
before achieving notoriety for his speaking and writing, which have
together made him the prime figure in the Open Source movement. His
best-known work is The Cathedral and the
Bazaar, the influential paper that became an influential
O'Reilly book by the same name. That book combined a series of
papers that serve as the canon for the Open Source movement. A
cofounder of the Open Source Initiative, Eric's name is also on the
spine of The Hacker's Dictionary, now in its
third edition. Eric will speak on “Twenty Years among the
Hackers”.

Guido van Rossum—the creator of Python, an
open-source scripting language that is exploding in popularity.
Guido created Python in the early 1990s at CWI in Amsterdam and
still leads development of the language. He moved to the US in 1995
and now works for Digital Creations, makers of Zope, the
open-source web application platform that is written in Python. At
Digital Creations he is director of PythonLabs, the core Python
development group. Guido will teach a half-day introduction to
Python.

Bruce Perens is a major GNU/Linux developer,
cofounder of the Linux Capital Group, cofounder of the Open Source
Initiative, and founder of the Linux Standard Base among many other
distinctions. Bruce will teach classes on Debian development and
speak on subjects ranging from “Hacking Politics” to the
“Economy with Free Software” to venture capital and ham
radio.

Jon “Maddog” Hall—the executive director of
Linux International, the leading nonprofit organization promoting
the use of Linux. His work with LI has been funded since 1999 by VA
Linux Systems. As a familiar figure in the Linux community, Maddog
is perhaps second only to Linus Torvalds himself (in fact he is
godfather to Linus' children). As a Linux veteran, Maddog has a
history that goes back through Compaq to Digital Equipment
Corporation to IBM to Bell Laboratories' UNIX group. Among many
other achievements, Maddog was directly responsible for the port of
Linux to the Alpha processor. Maddog will speak on “Linux in
Education” and “Task-Orientation: Where Linux Falls
Down”.

Art Tyde is cofounder and CEO of LinuxCare, the
leading Linux service and support provider. He was president of the
Bay Area Linux Users Group (BALUG) when he founded LinuxCare with
fellow BALUGer Dave Sifry (and he's still the president there). Art
is a corporate information systems veteran and IT disaster planning
and recovery expert who will be giving a half-day “Introduction to
SAMBA”.

Dave Sifry is cofounder, CTO and VP of Engineering
for LinuxCare, the company he founded with Art Tyde when both were
leading Linux lunatics at BALUG. An authority on open-source
development, Dave is still vice president of BALUG and serves on
the board of Linux International. Dave will give a keynote speech
on “The Future of Open Source”.

Barbee Davis is one of the leading authorities on
project management, owner of Davis Consulting and ExecuTrain and
coauthor of Macmillan's How to Learn Microsoft Project
2000 in 24 Hours. A certified project management
professional (PMP) and a veteran of countless major IT projects,
Barbee has had an impressive career working with corporations
ranging in size from IBM on down to the five new enterprises she
nurtured from concept to completion, winning numerous awards along
the way. Barbee will give a full-day session on “Why 90% of All IT
Projects Fail—and What To Do about It?”.

Randal L. Schwartz—one of the world's leading
authorities on Perl. He coauthored the must-have standard texts on
the subject: Programming Perl,
Learning Perl, Learning Perl for
Win32 Systems and Effective Perl
Programming. He is also a columnist for
WebTechniques and
UnixReview magazines. His company is
Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc., which he has owned and
operated since 1985. Randal will teach a full day of “Learning
Perl”.

Simson L. Garfinkel is chief scientist at
Broadband2Wireless and chief technology officer at Sandstorm
Enterprises, a computer security company that develops offensive
information warfare tools used to probe the security of computer
systems and test defenses. Simson is also a veteran journalist
whose byline has appeared in The Boston Globe,
The San Jose Mercury News, The
Christian Science Monitor, Technology Review
Magazine, ComputerWorld,
Forbes, The New York
Times, Omni,
Discover and WIRED, where
he was a founding contributor. He is also the author or coauthor of
nine books, the most recent of which is Database Nation:
The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century. Simson will
speak on privacy and data encryption.

Michael K. Johnson—has been working with Linux
since Linux kernel version 0.02 was released. He has contributed to
the kernel, utilities, toolkits, applications and documentation and
is the coauthor of Linux Application
Development, published by Addison-Wesley. He helped
build Red Hat Linux as a developer for several years and is now Red
Hat's manager of kernel engineering. He is also a private pilot,
voracious reader and small-time tool aficionado.

Reuven M. Lerner—has been writing the popular “At
the Forge” column for Linux Journal for over
five years and published the first newspaper on the Web just after
graduating from MIT. Named a “Web pioneer” by publisher O'Reilly
and Associates, Reuven now runs a consulting company specializing
in the creation of database-backed web sites that use a wide
variety of open-source operating systems, utilities, databases and
programming languages. Reuven lives halfway between Jerusalem and
Tel-Aviv, in Modi'in, known as Israel's “city of the future”.
Reuven will conduct a half-day “Application Server
Shoot-Out”.

Steve Roberts—was driven by “a combination of
chronic restlessness and midwestern torpor” into a “technomadic
life”. That was when, to the horror of friends and family, he sold
his suburban house, moved to a recumbent bicycle and began a
17,000-mile bicycle trip around the US—stopping now and again to
write books about the adventure or rebuild the substrate. The third
version of the bike, “Behemoth”, sported 72 watts of solar
panels, a network of on-board computers with handlebar chord
keyboard and head mouse, heads-up display, satellite Internet link,
105 speeds, ham shack and other goodies. By 1993, he was at work on
the bike's aquatic successor, the Microship, which is based on a
pair of canoe-scale amphibian pedal/solar/sail micro-trimarans with
on-board Linux servers, live telemetry to a public server, video
production tools, a complete suite of communications resources,
deployable landing gear and 480 watts of peak-power tracked solar
panels per boatlet, among other things. Steve will give a “Canoe's
Not UNIX” talk and participate in various BOF (Birds of a Feather)
sessions.

Michael “Monty” Widenius (like Linus, a
Swedish-speaking Finn)--has been working with databases since 1978.
He has been employed by and is part owner of TCX since 1981 and has
written all of UNIREG (the predecessor to MySQL) and most of the
MySQL server. He has studied physics at the Helsinki University of
Technology but is mostly self-taught in BASIC, Assembler, C, LISP,
Perl, SQL and C++; he is always willing to look at new languages
when he gets the time. Monty will be speaking on “History and
Introduction to MySQL”.

Doc Searls (yours truly)--senior editor of
Linux Journal (being the oldest on the
editorial staff) and of its new sister publication
Embedded Linux Journal. He's also coauthor of
The Cluetrain Manifesto, a New York
Times, Wall Street Journal and
Business Week best-seller. His byline has also
appeared in OMNI, PC
Magazine, The Globe and Mail,
Upside and WIRED, among
many other publications. At Linux Journal he
obsesses out loud on issues of business, infrastructure-building
and all the ways commerce and geekery get along without ever
knowing it. He'll be speaking on one or more of those
subjects.

And then there are the rest of the lunatics who sign up.

The number of technical sessions totals more than 30, plus
there will be countless opportunities just to hang out, talk and
have both geeky and other kinds of fun.

The conference fee is $750 but goes up to $875 after July 15,
2001 and includes all courses, course materials and the Bon Voyage
and Wizards Cocktail Parties. Spouses and guests are welcome to
join in the entertainment.

Doc
Searls is senior editor of Linux Journal and a coauthor
of The Cluetrain Manifesto.

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